8 RüdigerKunow
new urgency to questions concerning matters biological so that their
relation to culture has in our time become fraught with new
ambivalences and contradictions. Thus, "the inextricability of culture
and biology" ("American Studies" 190) of which Priscilla Wald has
recently spoken, must not be read as a seamless amalgamation of both
fieldsbutratherasacalltoreviewtheentrenchedapartheidofthesetwo
discursivefields.
Bybringingintofocusthenature/culturedichotomy,biologyisasite
which involves fundamental questions about human life in time and
space—questionswhichinnervatethe"human"intheHumanities.These
questions may in some ways be transcultural and transhistorical;
nonetheless the specific formulations of this dichotomy are at all times
culture- and situation-specific (as Latour and Woolgar also insisted).
This new cultural urgency of biological concerns has perhaps become
nowheremorenoticeablethaninthecontemporaryUnitedStates,where
"biomatters"operateatcoresitesofdebatesaboutthepresentandfuture
fate of U.S.-Americans and their nation, particularly issues relating to
the security of persons, corporations, or the nation itself (Helmreich).
Most notorious is of course the ongoing "War on Terror" which is
frequently envisioned in terms borrowed from biology such as the
ominous"self-replicatingsleepercells"ofterroristslivingundetectedin
thecountry(NationalIntelligenceEstimate2007qtd.inMitchellxii;M.
Cooper,"Pre-emptingEmergence"118).Beyondthat,thebiologicalhas
insistently insinuated itself into arguments from which it has hitherto
been largely absent: public and private finances, economic and urban
planning,citizenshiprightsandotherentitlements.Andthesereferences
are by no means trivial or recondite. A study has shown that in the
decade from 1991 to 2000 alone an estimated 880,000 deaths among
African Americans could have been averted if their mortality rates
had—through better health care—been equal to that of Caucasian
Americans (Woolf et al., "Health Impact" 2078-81). In other words, a
focus on human biology can make transparent how the most commonly
shared aspects of human existence, its biological features, serve as the
basis for social and cultural divisions and divisiveness. Humans are
biologicalbeingsbutdonotequallysharethebenefitsoftheirbiological
endowments. Instead, forms of biology-based apartheid have been a
salientfeatureofpracticallyallsocialandculturalformations.